The Future of the Book Archives - Page 2 of 13 - The Millions

From the moment I read about alt lit and cracked open a few PDFs, I wanted to create one. My latest article is a PDF. A congealed bit of technology, something we’re trying while we wait for literature’s savior format, not an app, not a Kindle download, but some new form yet to be discovered.

The impulse — now an industry — to spread good news about oneself far and wide has become soul-crushing. It makes me want to retreat into the garage with my outmoded books and unfinished manuscripts. I’ve come to see social media as a skill like anything else. I’m a mediocre interior decorator also. Nor can I cook, change the oil, or dance.

I don’t mean to make a fetish out of printed books, and I’m not asking to burn (or delete) ebooks, or their devices. Maybe all I ask is that digital books be designed in ways that give them character, that help them live and survive individually in your mind, rather than being translated into a common, anonymous display that passes through your memory as quickly as you scroll.

Fowler’s bookshop, oddly, is one of the least depressing bookshops I know. He had accepted the book’s demise. He may be the only person I know who can openly say, and with a smile on his face, that the book is dead. Dead as a doornail.

The most remarkable thing about Tiny Stories is the experimental, collaborative process behind its creation and the high quality of work that’s resulted from it. This is not what one would expect from a site where anyone can upload whatever they want and everyone can remix everyone else’s work and use it to make whatever.